Sunday, 15 March 2015

Happy Bubbles: A Positive Routine for Kids Who Struggle with Bedtime

Are you one of those parents (like me) who have difficulty getting your little ones to bed?

If your kids are anything like mine, bedtime has always been a struggle. I thought we'd finally gotten it under control when last year Kiddo 2 started to have bad dreams every night.

It all started after she'd watched a Terraria review on youtube and developed a fear of one of the bad guys. As she's not normally a sensitive viewer, this reaction took me a little by surprise.

She started to wake nightly needing my husband or me to stay in the room with her so she could fall back asleep. This sometimes took over half an hour and happened up to 2-3 times a night. She also developed a fear of being in her room without one of us while falling asleep. Needless to say this made things difficult as evening is a time I try to get some extra work done and at her age I had thought bedtime troubles were a thing of the past.

I realized that what she needed was to go to bed with happy, positive thoughts going through her head that would hopefully override the fearful ones. So we started Happy Bubbles. Every night after she was tucked in bed, we would "pop" happy bubbles all over her room.

We did this by taking turns saying something about the day that we were happy about or thankful for. Then we'd pretend to blow it in the air and allow it to pop happy thoughts all over her. We'd do this till we'd exhausted all our ideas and by the end, she's was filled with positive thoughts and able to settle into a peaceful sleep.

It took a little time before she stopped having bad dreams, but making Happy Bubbles a part of our bedtime routine helped immensely in the healing process. She still asks now to do it and it has become a fun family tradition. I think it's wonderful for all of us to embrace positive thoughts at the end of each day.